Cell phone charging ideas

Ive heard from many people that it hurts your battery to leave it on the charger for longer than neccesary. I think this is only true for one of the two main types of batteries- for some reason I didn’t find a quick answer online. But from personal experience at least this appears to be true- friends of mine who don’t leave their phone on the charger overnight can go days at a time before re-charging even after 2 years.

So why can’t battery chargers shut themselves off after the battery is full? This could be done with a simple sensor and circuit breaker built into the charger adapter. I don’t understand why this isn’t commonplace.

Another idea is for an on-the-go-charger that uses an off the shelf battery. In most cases this is wasteful and innefficint, but sometimes you just need your phone and don’t have time to wait for it to charge up. All I’m saying is that there’s a market for a walgreens bought module that let’s you grab a battery and walk out the door in a hurry. Also a must-have for those awkward campers who bring their phones out into the wild. I don’t back it, I’m just saying I think there’s a market there.

edit nov 30 3:42 pm

Yup it exists – just found it on the net.  By the way, I am aware that better solution is a solar powered charger.  Like this one.But the hundred dollar price tag makes it irrelevent for what im talking about – the last minute quick fix.  Hopefully this price will soon come down to 5 bucks at your local corner store with a cheap solar panel that – even if it wont keep your phone running – will at least give you that “3 minute charge per 1 minute phone call” that could be a lifesaver in a pinch.

micropayments: brainspill3

So how can we be careful about bundling?  We have to find a transaction medium that is immediate and transparent.  One thing that came to mind is when people install solar panels and feed power back into the grid:  This is immediate and transparent.  The power company can afford to pay users small amounts for their produced power because they piggyback it on a transaction that is already in place (utility payment) and already has a method of monitoring (your power meter).

Then I thought – what if people were able to make payments by subtracting it off a basic utility?  This would be safe, reliable, and wouldn’t cause an extra transaction.  Of course the problem is there is always a transaction cost of information.  How would a company possible partner with a utility company and how would they facilitate and regulate this transaction information?  Sure, paypal could facilitate between banks and pg&E to channel this payment info, but this seems like a stupid solution with no change or working.

But then i thought of something – a way to easily reroute a payment to your power bill.  Remember those guys who volunteer their processing power to crunch numbers for SETI?

Instead of paypal facilitating a micropayment from your bank account to an online store, the online store could just sell a product for processing time.  The store would let you install an app that would crunch their data and build up virtual dollars for their store.  Paypal could open a whole division that farms out processing hours and lets you exchange them for micro-goods from other vendors.  This processed information would be currency like power through your meter that is fluid, immediate, easily monitored, and reversible.

So you still pay for the product via your electric bill, but it will save you the transaction cost which is the name of the game for micropayments.

micropayments: brainspill2

I just got back from a run in the rain – I was thinking about micropayments again: The way you make micropayments work is all about  bundling – when you buy iphone apps, they bill you for a bunch at once to make the transaction more cost effective.  I thought of an interesting analog that now seems really obvious.- as you hear in the news a lot recently, one of the causes of our collapsed economy is the errant bundling of home mortgages.  While this can save a lot for buyers and sellers alike, it also has the risk of dissolving understanding and ownership of transactions.  I don’t have to tell you how much of a problem this can cause.

The interesting thing is it made me realize that “micropayment” is a relative not an absolute concept.  It is currently being described as a transaction under 5 dollars that carries a high transaction cost relative to the product cost.

Never wait on hold again! We’re so close.

A long time ago I mentioned that it was stupid for anyone to wait on hold, ever. – they should call us back.  (in one of my old pecha kucha presentations.)  Well, the other night, faced with AN HOUR hold time for bank of america, I decided to do something about it right away by hook or by hack.  This was my first try.  I just played a recording over and over asking the operator to call me back when they were ready. (phone number bleeped obviously)

As i suspected, the operators were not patient/curious enough to actually call me back.   Next I thought of another idea:

The virtue of slow networks

Not a new idea, but I reminded myself today that as painful as it can be to load webpqges on a cell phone, and as much as we want fast networks to be available as soon as possible, this predicament is a blessing In disguise. the push for sites to create a mobile version is an opportunity to reconsider what is truley imprtat on a website and what is fluff that gets in the way. The increase in mobile Internet usage will have a strong effect on regular Internet interface design.  Maybe all transportation websites will finally default to a clean simple schedule search without all the junk that 99% of people didn’t come to see.

Im always excited to see what the next chapter of moores law has in store for us, but sometimes a little forced economy is just what we need to keep some perspective on what good design is all about.

Emotional connection with your fans

Wired magazine had an article that talked about how many bands make their money on tshirt merch. but they said one guy does it differently – by “simply forging an emotional bond with his fans so they’ll pay cash for his mp3s”

I think forging an emotional bond is what it’s all about but I think you shouldn’t use it to sell mp3s because your music is your besr tool you have to forge that emotional connecyiom. Give away the musix and sell something else even i its “nothing”. Sell empty fake facebook gifts- if you have that cpnmection your fans will want to support you- just make it cheap and most importantly make the sale itself a fun experience. When the price Is cheap enoug it’s not about the money it’s about a social connection to something they want to be a part of for a cost that’s fair. Weirdly paying a dollar for getting nothing plus giving a social gestue can seem like a more fair deal than paying a dollar for getting a copy of a digital file.

Micropayments: brainspill1 – Could cheap be better than free?

Ive tried to finish this post three times now and keep moving my cursor back up to the top to start over.  I’ve got too much other things to move onto to brinstorm all the concepts that go into the new music website so im going to just logorrhea it out – so just stop reading now -

what’s up with micropayments?  People hate them and for good reason.  No one wants to be asked to pay a penny for something when it costs you more time in electricity bill to run your browser long enough to think about it.  But At the same time millions of people pay a dollar to send a gift on facebook that is nothing but a little icon?  Whats up with this?.  What it comes down to is sometimes people arent paying for the product – they pay for the experience of buying.  Dont charge for an album of music – give the album and then ask if you want to send a facebook gift to the artist.  The artist will then send a “personal” message back.  Yeah, everyone knows it isnt really “personal” but look at how popular obama’s blogging messages are.  There’s a certiain kind of false intimicy online that people understand and apporeciate for what it is.

birzzaro post recap

A comment on the post i just posted:  It was fun to write – just wanted to say that it’s part a thought on how the internet in all its glory will transform the workings of tomorrow into something (in ways) unimaginably different from today.  But it’s also a spontaneous commentary about the feeling in the air these days – that a young generation is being handed a world-system (government, economy, social, moral) that suddenly is not only broken, but which the older generation can’t even articulate why it stopped working.  If there is one thing the internet has taught us it’s that the spirit of “wait, can we do that?!?!  Really, that will work?!”  Often leads to something that does work and that overturns business as usual for the better overnight.  The real seductive idea is that this generation’s innovation is just beginning to be tested.  When the old rules are suddenly at a loss as to which theorys work and which don’t, we’ve got a lot of tinkering to do to find something that does work.  We’re American innovators -as usual we’ll think big, and we won’t be scared to experiment with something that seems ridiculous but just.. might.. work..

?

I just had an idea that seems beautifully seductive.  I was lying in bed thinking about George W. Bush’s plea to Congress to approve his administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal.  He said:  “The government  is the only institution patient enough to buy these assets at their current low prices and hold them until their prices return to normal.”

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/24/bush.bailout/

As I considered that statement for a minute, I was reminded of that clichéd but persistent noble truth that the government is nothing but the will of the people and the only thing bigger than the government  must always be the will of the people.  Then I suddenly realized that the internet age has started to do something amazing – it has given this truism something eerily tangible.

Obama’s campaign harnessed the internet with a spirit that is, in a way , old school:  It is the American Government  ethos: from each small vote emerges the ever changing one great nation.  But, suddenly the voice of the American people can be heard at a drastically different frequency.   What was once a low rumble in the ground that emerged every once in a while for an election is now a voice that speaks almost directly to us whenever  it wants.  In some ways this kind of zeitgeist is the same as it ever was – society’s art that we take up as our spokesperson.  But it’s different now.  The voice is emergent – chosen only by the net sum of the viral community, but it is made up of concise stories.  These stories are sporadic, seemingly random, and almost always inane.  This is the conglomerate voice of our young internet using demographic whose first word was hamster dance.  But infants soon say the darndest things.  Obama’s campaign showed us is that this rabble has matured and it has a little more up it’s sleeve than youtube inanity.  Sometimes this voice is crystal clear and speaks with alarming precocity.

“Why can’t we understand that free music is not an option?” – IFPI

In January 2008, the president of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry addressed digital music piracy with this statement:

“If people can be made to understand that free is not an option, we could get a dramatic improvement,” John Kennedy said. “That, for me, would be the beginning of a recovery.” http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/24/technology/music.php

IFPI website with “anti-free music” headlines

But to a generation who grew up on Napster, this falls on deaf ears.   Free is not only an option, it is the reality, it’s happening all around us and it is fantastic.  Not only that, but our instincts that “free” works are supported more and more by people like Chris Anderson who points out that free media industries like newspapers have been using a “free” advertising cross-subsidy model for ages.  So how are we supposed to react when big industries say things like free wont work?  We ask why?  Our music is still here for free now, are you saying free will make it go away?  If so, why should we believe you?  You’re saying free music is some kind of bubble that will eventually pop and our music will dry up, but as far as we can see you’re just whining because your sales are down 10% and you haven’t done anything about it to change with the times.  On our end, we’re seeing as much music as ever with more ways to get at it.

Now this is going to be a weird connection that will take a minute to bring around, but I’m going to go with it…  This reminds me of the disconnect I hear when Henry Paulson tells banks “don’t horde your bailout money, spend it.”  Isn’t this a classic Nash Equilibrium problem? – each bank wants to bolster their own security and knows that they put themselves at risk if they lend.  By making a blanket statement asking them all to spend at once you’re just asking them all to lower their guns – but what if the other bank doesn’t lower their’s, they say – and so no one responds, or when one tries to respond it might end pretty badly.  (most any quentin tarantino will illustrate this point nicely graphically).   Even if you think you know what is good for the market you can’t just say “do it” to all parties stuck in a stagnant equilibrium.  You have to create forces that will predictably sway individual decisions till they waterfall towards a net result of momentum that will overcome the equilibrium valley that they are stuck in.  But the bailout money doesn’t necessarily supply momentum (think of energy) to start banks lending again.  It supplies “confidence” which is more like potential energy.  By “bolstering confidence” you could just end up raising all of their potentials at once to get out of their lending freezes, but leave them like roller coaster cars at the top of their tracks still just waiting for the other one to start rolling down the hill.  In princial boosting confidence works in a market, but if the players are tied too closely together – like men with guns pointed at each other, you can’t just uniformly give them all that increase in the potential to lend; you still might not change their equilibrium position – you just raise the stakes.  Even if you give them the power to get out of their stagnant state, if they will benefit more by using that leverage to insulate themselves from a falling market, that is what they will choose to do until someone else makes the first move.  And the steady state stagnancy will remain, there will be a net average increase of “don’t lend” decisions.
Now, what the hell did that have to do with the music industry?  I’ll tell you at the end of the post if it doesn’t accidentally dawn on you sooner.

Music 2.0 – Jump ship while you still can musicians, something better is a-comin.

“The music industry will look very different in five years. Even download revenue won’t be the most important revenue source.” – Edgar Bronfman, Jr. CEO of Warner Music at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco – November 6, 2008

————–

Not CD sales, Not online music sales, how will Musicians make any money?  There are actually plenty of ways like advertising, concert tickets, merchandise, and branding influence.  It’s just that people have a really hard getting past the equation Song=$1 so we can’t begin to imagine other ways of monetizing music.

Since my first rough attempt to imagine a social network music platform (see previous post), I’ve been making some contacts and starting to sow the seeds for a web startup.  I hope to post some progress soon.  But in the meantime – here is some news on what’s going down.

Even Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman has acknowledged that CD sales alone are an outdated monetization model:  As techcrunch puts it here – even big business “sees the writing on the wall – music downloads will eventually be free, and will serve as little more than marketing collateral to other revenue streams.”

While it is good that big business is finally coming around, this particular announcement from Bronfman is  somewhat ominous.  His announcement that Warner will mandate “360″ music deals, details how producers will now take a cut from everything that every artist sells including concert tickets and merchandise, and that they even reserve the right to give away content for free as promotional material.

This is why it is so important to develop an online platform for musicians (both grass roots and established) that gives them the power to not just sell their own music online (amie street, myspace, cd baby etc) but to promote their own music over social networks and supply incentives to crowdsourced microlabels who can easily find the fingers of a longtail fanbase where big production companies don’t even try to compete on a local scale.  (For those of you haven’t heard, an artist only takes home a dollar or two from the 16 bucks you pay for a CD.)  Record labels aren’t necessarily evil – they supply a lot of resources for a band.  But the internet has brought in a new era that replaces these services for often no cost.  We’re dragging our feet about taking advantage of new possibilities because we’re stuck in old ways of thinking.  More on this to come – but in the meantime, this website is the best thing I’ve seen out there yet – check it out.

Lala.com

Found! Bike Handle Bar Lock Design

Thanks for the tip Mark -

Found in Amsterdam – bike handles that double as a bike lock.

and I also found this really nice design by Designer Joe Wentworth -

http://www.design21sdn.com/competitions/11/entries/3095/gallery

The handlebars fold to save space and while they arent meant to lock the bicylce to something, they provide an extra deterent to another lock.